Computer Science News

Matthew Leeke has joined the Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor.

Matthew joins the department as the first post holder for the John Buxton Lectureship in Computer Science, having completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at The University of Warwick in 2008 and gone on to join the department's Performance Computing and Visualisation Group for his PhD.

Matthew's primary research interests relate to issues in the design, implementation and evaluation of dependable software systems. In particular, his most recent work has focused on the development of frameworks for the design of dependable software systems based on software measurement and metics, fault injection analysis techniques for the evaluation of software systems and approaches for the generation of efficient error detection mechanisms.

For more information on Matthew's research interests and teaching please visit his homepage or stop by CS2.06.

Last week we were pleased to be host to an entire Year 8 (about 95 twelve-year-olds and their teachers) from St Alban's Academy in Birmingham. The visit was organised by Rushda Joomun one of the first of our graduates in Discrete Mathematics who was only a few weeks into the TeachFirst programme. It was what the school called a 'SuperLearning Day'. We organised a 'roundabout' of sessions: the Mathematics of animal gaits in Maths, Three sorts of sorting (without computers!) in Computer Science, and how to draw stars (and other shapes) with Scratch in the DigiLab.

Many thanks to the local IET Branch for sponsoring lunch, and to Claire Davenport of the British Computer Society for visiting and giving us inspiring words at the end. The children were excited, enthusiastic and seemed to enjoy themselves a lot - judging by the roar of approval at the end of the day! What impressed us the most was the high degree of engagement and attention being given by all the children across a very wide ability range in all the sessions. This was a credit not only to the children and their teachers but also to the hard work and preparation undertaken by the session leaders. Many thanks to all - we think everybody learned a great deal from the SuperLearning Day!

Tim Davidson successfully completed his PhD titled "Formal Verification Techniques using Quantum Process Calculus" under the supervision of Dr Rajagopal Nagarajan. Quantum information processing is an emerging technology and formal modeling of quantum protocols is important for the design and development of quantum communication and cryptographic systems. Tim's thesis contributes to the development of the quantum process calculus CQP, proposed by Gay and Nagarajan in POPL'05. In particular, it investigates process equivalence and solves an open problem by proposing a suitable congruence. Tim's external examiner was Dr Paulo Mateus (Lisbon) and his internal examiner was Dr Jane Sinclair.

Tim is currently attending interviews for jobs in information security.

Recent results on the Unistats official website show that of those Computer Science graduates from Warwick, who have gained employment 6 months after graduation, 100% are in working in graduate level employment.

Warwick Computer Science is in the top tier of computer science departments (with four other universities) with respect to graduate employability. It is also the second most targeted by graduate employers for graduate recruitment programmes in the UK - second only to Cambridge.

Professor Jianfeng Feng from the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is one of the most prestigious UK awards, supported by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract to this country or to retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement. More information is available from http://www.wolfson.org.uk.

Professor Feng will be working on a project entitled "Bridging the gap between fMRI and Genome-wide data with applications in diseases".

News on some of Professor Feng's more recent work can be found at: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/04/health/depressed-brains-hate-differently/?hpt=he_c2

(See also The Royal Society announcement.)

Dr Amin Coja-Oghlan, Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Computer Science and Warwick Mathematics Instititue, has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant.

ERC Starting Grant is one of the most prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council for world-class researchers, and Amin is one of the very few researchers in Warwick to receive this grant. His new ERC Starting Grant, worth over a million of euros for the period of five years, has been awarded for his project »Phase Transitions and Computational Complexity«.

Dr Coja-Oghlan's main research area is in the Theoretical Computer Science, with special focus on the study of Algorithms and Complexity via rigorous mathematical methods, on the boundary of computing, combinatorics, and probability. He published pver 30 papers in refereed journals (eight as a sole author) and a similar number of papers in the proceedings of international Computer Science conferences. He is the winner or the EATCS Award for the best paper in Track A at the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2009), and he has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences in computer science and in mathematics.

We welcomed over 200 visitors to the Department at the Open Day at Warwick on 24th September. There was a full programme of talks, demonstrations and displays with staff, students and alumni also participating. The next University Open Day is on Saturday 12th May 2012. For further details of that, and of Warwick Visits and Campus Tours this term, see

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/visits/opendays/

There is also a Virtual Tour linked from that page. If you are making a Warwick Visit, or an independent visit, and give us advance notice, we shall try and arrange for someone to show you around the Department and have a chat. We can usually do this on a Wednesday or a Friday in the afternoon, but also other times are possible. Please contact Gillian Reeves-Brown on 02476 523193 to make arrangements.